By Nick Johnson
njohnson@scbiznews.com
Published June 19, 2012

Companies can create new assets by commercializing their intellectual property rights, said Bill Coughlin, CEO of Ford Global Technologies, during a SCRA Technology Ventures event held in Charleston last week.

The briefing focused on how companies can implement different strategies to protect their intellectual property and use those assets to grow their business.

Several companies and organizations, including the U.S. Department of Commerce, the Darla Moore School of Business, the College of Engineering and Computing at the University of South Carolina, and the National IP Taskforce spoke at the event.

Dirk Brown, director of the Faber Entrepreneurship Center at the Darla Moore School of Business, said there has been an increasing need for more procedures and strategies that companies may use to help increase revenue both nationally and internationally that would have otherwise been lost because of poor intellectual property management.

“The majority of the value in almost every enterprise is in non-physical, intangible assets. That’s about 75% of the S&P 500 stocks. Business leaders need to understand how to best leverage and legally protect those intangible assets,” Brown said. “IP strategy is the responsibility of the operating executive, not their patent attorneys.”